Overview
- CNBC published a companion list to its annual Top States for Business study that on Saturday ranked Tennessee first worst and Texas second worst using a quality-of-life subscore that now counts for 11.6 percent of a state’s overall score.
- The outlet said its quality-of-life scoring used hard data on crime rates, air quality, health care access, childcare costs, inclusiveness of state laws and reproductive-rights rules to produce the bottom-10 list.
- CNBC cited concrete drivers for low grades such as Texas’ 16.7 percent uninsured rate and last-place primary care physicians per capita and Tennessee’s high violent-crime and drug-death rates plus laws affecting LGBTQ+ protections.
- Conservative politicians and outlets sharply rejected the list as ideologically biased, pointing to U.S. Census net-migration gains in many named states and to the contrast between poor quality-of-life scores and strong business rankings.
- The dispute highlights a broader debate over how to weigh social-policy metrics against economic and migration data when assessing where people want to live and where companies locate, and it likely means CNBC’s methodology will remain a focal point of coverage and political response.